


Journeyman

by Noorah



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Alternate Universe- WHL, Basically 'what if Dex was raised in Portland Oregon and played in the Dub before Samwell', Gen, Honestly thats it, real hockey team mentions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-18
Updated: 2017-01-18
Packaged: 2018-09-18 08:13:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,341
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9376064
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Noorah/pseuds/Noorah
Summary: He's drafted by the Oil Kings. In Edmonton. In Alberta. Almost a thousand miles from home.He goes.





	

**Author's Note:**

> aka the 'portland oregon' au
> 
> aka the author loves the pnw and the whl and this magically appeared

Dex catches the bus to school on the corner of Alberta St and Vancouver Ave, and later on in life he’ll appreciate that poetic irony and the chirps that’ll come along with it. It’s a good life, a life with his parents and siblings where they never have more than they need but they always have just enough to get by. 

The big splurge for the family is the season tickets they share with Uncle Byron and Aunt Jess to the Winterhawks games. There’s 36 home games in a season, so 18 nights a year (and sometimes more after Aunt Jess has Katie and Kyle) Will gets to sit and watch the big kids play hockey. 

He starts playing at 6, when his brother’s old gear finally fits, and he takes to the ice like a bird to air. Will skates and skates and begs to stay after and loves playing the games and having the rotations in position. He’s happiest on the ice that year.

He’d just turned 11 when Coach asks if anyone is interested in being a puck kid at the Hawks games, collecting the pucks after warm ups. His hand shoots into the air so fast he thinks he actually sprained it or something. (He didn’t. But he did get the job.)

So a couple days a week for the next three years he arrives before every game and watches warm ups from the bench before racing out to collect the pucks. For a little boy who dreams of one day playing in front of the home crowd, it’s amazing. 

He’s playing bantam the year he’s draft eligible, now a D-man during every game instead of rotating, when he learns he’s been drafted into the WHL. 

But not by the Winterhawks. 

He’s drafted by the Oil Kings. In Edmonton. In Alberta. Almost a thousand miles from home. 

He goes.

* * *

His rookie season isn’t the greatest but honestly just having an Oil Kings jersey with his name on it and playing every team in the WHL is amazing. He doesn’t love Edmonton but he likes his team.

Until they trade him as extra collateral with their top scoring forward for a defenseman who is 18 and seasoned and can actually score goals and isn’t minus 2 and isn’t a rookie who sits out a game a week… Well. It’s Vancouver. And they aren’t doing the greatest. So maybe he can help?

Poetic irony. He heads 720 miles west.

The boy who grew up on the corner of Alberta and Vancouver has now lived in and played in both. He spends a season and a half in Vancouver and he enjoys it. He’s 250 miles from home this time and his family comes to see him when he’s playing the I-5 rivalry teams and he stays at home some nights after games in Portland. He likes Vancouver and the boys and the coach which is why that offseason trade to Spokane throws him off. 

He plays in Spokane and now it’s more like he’s an outsider looking in. The other guys’ve been around for years and once again it’s him and some rookies coming into a club that’s established. But he goes and he wears his third jersey in three seasons and he tries to keep himself from getting attached because he sees the trade coming from miles away. 

“Poindexter, Austin. You’re headed to the Wheat Kings.”

Excellent. Will’s now a member of the “Every Goddamn Division Club” and heading 1,300 miles from home. 

Another trade. Another room. Another jersey. Another team. 

Will plays for Brandon (admittedly a great team with a shot at going places that season) but he doesn’t enjoy hockey as much as he had in the past. He’s far from home. He doesn’t have a home. He misses Voodoo Donuts and the Pacific Ocean and not having to deal with snow constantly. He’s considering retiring. He’s considering being done, taking his four years of scholarship money and heading for a university in BC. Playing hockey and getting a degree and going to a team in Europe to play pro. 

He sends an application to Samwell after they express interest. And he doesn't think about it again.

And then the team’s admin assistant listens to him complain about not loving hockey anymore and wanting to be done and go home and somehow he’s invited to a meeting with him and the GM who also listens. And then she does something that stuns Will. 

She calls the Portland GM and they make a trade. 

William Poindexter, for the first time since he was 16, is headed home.

* * *

He doesn’t billet his overage season, he stays at home and drives himself to the rink and he doesn’t feel like he quite fits in but he’s a Portland boy and being from the city makes him a favorite. It doesn’t hurt he’s been going between starting d-pair and second line and it doesn’t hurt that he’s not afraid to fight or to lose his temper, but the lump in his throat is there every time he signs a # 37 jersey for a fan. 

He fistbumps the puck kids after every home warm up. Part of warming up for him means sitting in those nosebleed seats his family had when he was a kid and getting into the zone. 

It’s a good season.

And then he gets an invite in the mail. 

It’s from Samwell, inviting the prospects to come meet the team and skate with them and see the campus and it’s on a rare weekend with no games, so he pays for his plane ticket out of his summer money spent working at Uncle Byron’s crab shack and he flies to Boston and is picked up by a tiny chick who introduces herself as “Larissa but call me Lardo, brah. I’m the manager. We’re waiting on a couple other guys but let me introduce you to Nurse and Chow.”

There’s handshakes all around and then a drive to campus. A tour. A meet and greet. (Is that Jack Zimmermann?) A dinner. A presentation. A skate. Three days go by in a blur and Will has this feeling that maybe he could like it here. Playing in the NCAA, getting a degree in computer science or math or business and playing hockey…

He trades facebook information with the other prospects and some of the players and thanks the coaches and shakes Jack’s hand and gets a hug from Bitty who tells him that he hopes to see him soon. 

He boards a flight. 

He gets back Sunday night. He skates Monday. He plays Tuesday. 

He sends in an acceptance on Wednesday.

* * *

Will plays the rest of that last season, every shift, like it’s the very last one and he tries to enjoy playing for his hometown. For the crowd that he’s not the prodigal son of, but that he’s at least a loved child of. This is his city and these are his people and he’s theirs as well.

The last home game he’s given an award for being a hard worker and a dedicated part of the community and he doesn’t cry as he accepts it from the booster club and skates back to the bench. 

He doesn’t cry when they’re knocked out in the second round. 

He only lets himself cry after everyone else is gone and he’s the only one left, sitting in that seat he sat in as a child in Moda. 

They call guys like him ‘journeymen’ in the NHL. In the WHL he just feels useless. 

He arrives at Samwell for training with five WHL jerseys in his closet and a chip on his shoulder. He’s never been the player a team wants to keep around, a player so loved, so admired, so talented that they spent their five years with the same team, being groomed for captaincy and to lead a club. 

He’s the one that makes a trade a little more worthwhile.

* * *

It’s culture shock going from being ‘Pointsie’ on the ice to being ‘Dex’, but it’s a change that he thinks he can grow to like. The rhythm here is different. The focus is on class and then hockey, high expectations on both but a schedule that’s a lot less frantic than his had been in the Dub. He’s paired with everyone during that first week, skating behind Bitty and Jack and paired with Ransom or Holster and then being paired with Nursey. 

They bicker constantly off the ice, but holy shit it hasn’t been this easy to slot into place since he was playing Bantam and he’s amazed. The coaches are pleased and he and Nursey start playing third pair, but are often switched to second. 

He likes his classes. He likes the boys. 

He tries not to get attached, far too used to loving a place only to be told that he’s been sent somewhere else, but it’s hard at Samwell. He loves it.

He lets himself love it. 

He thinks that Jack sees it, Jack’s a good captain and while he doesn’t understand being someone without a club behind you, without one team keeping you, he does see how hard Dex is willing to work. He was the prodigal son Dex always wanted to be, the hometown hero, the legacy child and Dex was the journeyman who wasn’t important enough to be kept around. 

He can’t hold that against Jack because it’s not Jack’s fault he was everything Dex had wanted to be growing up. But he thinks they have an understanding, and they get along well. Jack admires that Dex doesn’t give up or quit when it would be easier and Dex admires that Jack is able to lead their merry band of misfits.

* * *

When Bitty gets the C, Dex cheers along with the rest of the boys, but when the coaches announce that he and Nursey get the As he can't move. He was never meant to be an important, integral part of this team.

At that moment Dex realizes he's not replaceable anymore.

And then he’s listening to Nursey accept and thank everyone and he steps up to the mic and thanks them too. And then he adds that he understands why he never quite fit in where he went in the WHL, that he wasn’t meant to fit there. 

He was meant to fit right here.

It’s a good junior year, a hard one full of work and breaking appliances and Jack and Bitty and NHL games they get tickets for a couple times a month. It’s cheering Jack on and meeting the Falcs and getting to see the locker room and growing into a self that Dex never saw coming. 

It’s a chance run-in with Georgia Martin who nearly drops her clipboard when she sees him, and he does drop his (thankfully closed) water bottle and they just kinda. Stare. At each other. It’s Jack awkwardly asking if they know each other and George hugging Dex fiercely because she’d traded him to Portland because he was unhappy and then basically traded herself to the Falcs because she was unhappy. 

It’s a GM in the NHL who knows his name and a friend who has an A on the Falcs and who brings some of the guys to their games when he can. It’s team sleepovers at Jack’s after Falc’s games and kegsters in the Haus after theirs. 

It’s a good junior year and it ends with the coaches announcing that a unanimous vote made him captain for his senior year and he lets himself tear up because it means so much to him that this locker room has loved him and treated him like he’s worthwhile. It’s Nursey slinging an arm around his shoulders and telling him congrats and then passing the rolls and Bitty smiling hugely from the end of the table and Chowder talking excitedly about his and Nursey’s A’s. 

For the first time since he started playing competitive hockey, Dex is home.

* * *

Senior year passes with some interest from a few NHL teams who say he’ll probably end up on the farm teams for a while but that they like his style and his ability to lead from defense and his vision on the ice. It’s a meeting with George in a Starbucks where she introduces him to another female GM who works for the Seattle Schooners expansion and who wants to sign him. 

It’s not Portland, but he’s a PNW boy at heart, so after talks and tryouts he signs with the Schooners and hopes that it all works out. 

Senior year ends with a loss in the Frozen Four, an epic kegster, the Falcs winning the Stanley Cup, his diploma and the bittersweet addition of one more jersey next to the five in his closet. That chip on his shoulder has been filed down by four years at Samwell and a team that helped mend the hurt the Dub had created.

* * *

Rookie year starts something like this: “25yo Rookie D-Man Given ‘A’ For Seattle Schooners Inaugural Season”.

Rookie year starts with him being the prodigal son, the hometown hero, the kid from the PNW who made it to the show. 

He skates hard, he plays hard, he works hard, he hangs with the juniors and the little kids when he can and volunteers when he’s home and able to do so. He signs jerseys and scores his first NHL goal on Snowy and he’s congratulated after the game by a squad of beaming Falcs led by Jack. 

It’s a good life and his family moves into a house that’s not on the corner of Alberta and Vancouver and he sends his sister to art school and buys Nursey a stupid expensive notebook for his birthday and snapchats himself trying to bake to Bitty and goes out to dinner with Farmer and Chowder when they play in San Jose.

He lives. He smiles. He belongs.

And he always fistbumps every kid when he gets off the ice.

**Author's Note:**

> This was birthed from a tumblr post that mentioned Dex being from Oregon, a tag from Audia asking for my input and the intense conversation that ensued after I messaged Audia "IM WRITING THIS AND I BLAME YOU". A huge thank you to Audia as well for the wonderful Beta read and the comments and editing! You're a gem and I appreciate you so!!
> 
> It's written from a place of bitterness over Major Junior trades and the sheer love I hold for those players.


End file.
